The Future Leader Mobility

#1 Customer Experience

Digital transformation is dead - if you're going through a digital transformation then your business is probably in big trouble. The end goal should not be to digitise a company but to deliver better products, services and cost efficiencies.

When asking clients if they've deep-dived and mapped out their customer journey recently, almost every online business says yes and brick-and-mortar or mixed businesses says no.

Understanding how customers interact with your products, services and business is the key to success, not digital.

#2 Reimagining Business

To stay competitive it's equally important for the future leader to reimagine internal ways of working including the processes and tools for employees.

As part of reimagining the future leadership , we also see a major shift from products to services. Instead of buying nicotine gum, a person trying to quit smoking signs up to a quit smoking support program which includes the gum or patches (e.g. Nicotinell) and instead of buying a car, customers sign up to a car service (e.g. Zipcar).

The biggest challenge is that there are so many opportunities and so little time and resources. Therefore organisations must become faster and more efficient to succeed. 

#3 Human Centric Design

User Experience is not art. Never trust a UX designer who doesn't involve end-users in the design process. It will fail 9 out of 10 times.

More organizations are combining Lean UX with Design Thinking as foundations for Customer Experience (CX) to prioritize learning over delivering arbitrary software.

The ability to learn quickly, and apply those learnings systematically, allows tremendous value to be unlocked in the form of mobile experiences, apps, and services.

#4 Customer centric IoT

“The Internet will disappear. There will be so many IP addresses, so many devices, sensors, things that you are wearing, things that you are interacting with, that you won't even sense it.

It will be part of your presence all the time. Imagine you walk into a room, and the room is dynamic. And with your permission and all of that, you are interacting with the things going on in the room." Eric Schmidt, Alphabet Chairman

With every human expected to own some 20 or more connected devices by the year 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) is a phenomenon brands can't afford to ignore.

Our future interactions with information and digital services will be contextual, conversational, and span across a multitude of different brands, providers, sensors, objects, and interfaces.

#5 Big & Small Data Insights

Data has the power to solve problems in every industry and area of society. This doesn't mean to completely stop looking for new insights and patterns in the data.

But when doing this we should also be making sure that the deep-dive insights will solve a problem. The most common problem with big data, business intelligence and data visualisation implementations in companies is that they invested in a tool based on business requirements.

As a matter of fact, the majority of organisations have invested in multiple tools but few actually use them for anything productive other than creating beautiful graphs.

Instead they should have started with the business problems they want to solve. Successful data-driven organizations use data to come up with new products and services, optimize the business and improve customer experience.

#6 Innovation Labs Failure

65% of senior executives face increased pressure to innovate (Capgemini). The climate now is “disrupt or be disrupted.”

Since 2014 almost every fortune 500 company opened an innovation lab but are they delivering results? The stats show that they:

a) are too slow in decision making, processes and delivering results

b) not taking enough risk and focusing on incremental innovation

c) lack integration with core product / service lines of the business

d) not clear what problems the innovation lab is there to solve

In conclusion, they turn into trendy money pits without buy-in throughout the organization. In 2017, many organizations will re-integrate innovation in the core product and service areas. However, it is imperative to fix the core issues identified above.